I’ve written before about a few tech tools that journalists can use. Like Slack, which you can use in your newsroom to talk to each other. Or secure instant messengers for journalists. Some of the best journalism colleges in India also teach a lot of new media tools. I recently came across a simple problem. Imagine you’ve just got a big dump of text that you need to search through for the occurrence of a particular word or phrase. Like the file that hackers dumped on the Internet containing a list of all files that are on Sony’s servers. [caption id=”attachment_1314″…

Happy to report that the data journalism workshop we held with the good folks from Datameet went well last month. The biggest learning for me was that there is so much more I can do with data. Nisha from Datameet has made some notes on the Datameet blog. It has some notes from the workshop and links to some of the resources we discussed. Thejesh & Nisha at the Workshop The agenda with notes are here and the resources have been shared on the data journalism resource wiki page. Datameet has also been putting together a data catalog that you might want to…

I don’t have to tell you that data journalism is important. It has become a part of mainstream journalism now. Indian publications like The Economic Times (where I work) and of course foreign publications have been making extensive use of new data tools to produce great stories. This New York Times feature on Reshaping New York, is a great example. Of course that’s a complex project and tough to pull off. The Economic Times has a brilliant data blog run by Avinash. The Hindu also has one going. Papers like The Indian Express have done a few data projects as well. TLDR: Data is…

Data is great. If it comes with context. Without that, its piffle. No matter how well it has been visualized. Case in point is this data story published by The Indian Express last week. It talks about MPs with criminal charges against them. Besides listing parties with MPs facing criminal charges, Top five states with MPs facing criminal charges and Top parties with MPs facing criminal Charges, it shows top MPs with criminal charges against them. It paints a very ominous picture of these MPs. What’s wrong with this? Everything. These politicians may have criminal cases against them. But it is not all…

Oorvani Foundation, a non-profit media foundation that supports independent public affairs journalism, in collaboration with Daksh, a non-profit focused on improving accountability in politics and governance, is inviting applications for the Daksh-IT Election 2014 Data Journalism Fellowship. Two applicants will be selected to research, analyse data and write on select themes related to the 2014 General Elections. Fellowship Amount Rs.75,000 to be paid in two instalments, one at the beginning of the Fellowship and one on completion of publishing the required number of stories. Eligibility Professional journalists, including freelancers, in Print and New Media in English, with at least one year…